Sandra Taylor Rouja found out she was expecting her first child on the day her husband bought an old boat to fix up. It was 1965. The boat, Curlew, became a fixture in their lives for the next 12 years. Today, the 86-year-old history lover is researching the story of Curlew and is calling for anyone with information to contact her.

Ms Taylor Rouja is the author of several works of fiction, poetry and memoir including the Bermuda Cottage Diary, I Sing of the Sea / Canto Do Mar and the St George’s Dream.

Curlew was built locally by A. Smith in October 1926.

She has heard that it was launched just as a hurricane approached the island. The category 4 storm was known as the Havana-Bermuda hurricane or the Valerian Hurricane after the HMS Valerian, which sank off Bermuda in the storm, taking the lives of 80 sailors with it.

Mrs Rouja suspected the fishing vessel was named after the HMS Curlew, another navy ship that was badly damaged during the monster storm.

“She was built for offshore commercial fishing and then was used as a pilot boat, but under sail,” Mrs Rouja said.

One of her treasures is a post-war tourist map with a little drawing of the Curlew in the corner.

“That is from 1947,” she said. “So we know it was no longer a fishing boat at that time.”

Her family acquired it around 1965 when her husband, Pierre Rouja, a chef and a close friend, Joe Klein, spotted the Curlew on a mooring in Mill Creek, Pembroke. It was up for sale and in need of work.

The couple bought it for £700. Then the hard work began. The boat was hauled out and stripped back to its bones.

“It was beautifully made,” Mrs Rouja remembered. “It had great cedar knees.”

The vessel, a boatbuilder’s dream, drew admiring comments from seasoned Bermudian mariners.

“The head of the ferry service told Pierre its big Gardner engine was the last of its kind and should have been in a museum,” Mrs Rouja said.

Mr Rouja, originally from the foothills of the Pyrenees, had an eye for both engineering and adventure. Through a connection with shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig, Mr Rouja sourced two large submarine portholes and sank them into the bottom of the Curlew, allowing the family to look at the sea floor as they sailed.

Mrs Rouja met her late husband during her first diving lesson at age 16.

“I would ride my pedal bike up to the Pompano Beach Club in Southampton,” Mrs Rouja recalled. “At that time people in Bermuda usually learnt to dive in shallow, open water, not in a swimming pool as they do today.”

Things did not go swimmingly, at first.

After she got into the water, weighted down, the mask was too big and began to flood.

“I was panicking,” she said. “Suddenly someone was behind me and raised me up out of the water.”

It was Mr Rouja. “I rather thought he saved my life,” she said with a smile. They were married in 1959.

Mr Rouja started diving with colleague Teddy Tucker when they worked together at a French restaurant on Crow Lane called La Caravelle.

Mr and Mrs Rouja dove and snorkelled together for six years before their son Jean-Pierre was born. Later, they snorkelled more than they dove and after the birth of her second son, Philippe, stopped diving altogether.

“Pierre learnt to dive with Teddy Tucker, who moored off the restaurant where he was chef,” Mrs Rouja said. “One day Teddy came up, pulled a wad of toilet paper from his pocket and said ‘look what I found today’.”

It was the famed Tucker Cross found in 1955 and discovered stolen two decades later.

“Pierre brought up an octant, with its bone arm still in it,” Mrs Rouja said.

An octant is an 18th century navigational aid that often had an index arm that included bone.

“Someone promptly stepped on it,” Mrs Rouja recalled. “I found a clay bowl. We traded the bowl with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, in exchange for conserving the octant.”

In 1970, the Roujas rented the boat to Philippe Cousteau, son of Jacques Cousteau, famed oceanographer and film-maker.

“He was coming to Bermuda with a crew, including his wife, Janet, to film the whales,” Mrs Rouja said. “It wasn’t the best time of year, but it was when the whales came.”

The Cousteau team moored Curlew off Bethel’s Island in Ely’s Harbour, Sandys, and used her as a working platform on the reefs through winter squalls and narrow weather windows. For all its beauty, the boat was not ideal in a storm.

Eventually, maintaining such a large vessel while raising children and managing demanding hotel work became too much for the Roujas.

The vessel required a proper crew.

“It needed someone always on board who knew how to start it and all those things,” Mrs Rouja said. “Outings began to feel like a responsibility as much as an escape. Pierre’s job was becoming more and more interesting and he travelled more frequently.”

The day they said goodbye was a sad day and became sadder as time went on and they realised what a treasure they had once had.

Pierre Rouja died in May 2015. The Curlew is still afloat today and has been turned into a houseboat.

The Rouja’s sons have maintained their parents’ keen interest in nature and the ocean.

Philippe is principal scientist in marine heritage and ocean human health and the Custodian of Historic Wrecks for the Bermuda Government and Jean-Pierre is cofounder and executive director of BioQuest, a non-governmental agency that uses genomics to support biodiversity conservation in Bermuda.